Another great interview by Nicholas O'Brien for Chicago-based contemporary art blog Bad At Sports! In this clip, O'Brien speaks with game designer and artist Jason Rohrer. For this series of interviews, O'Brien captures media artists within the medium in which they work - whether it be Second Life, Video, or in the case of the above, Rohrer's game, Sleep Is Death. Rohrer was a panelist for the Rhizome New Silent Series event on indie gaming "Next Level" a few years ago, if you want to watch a video of that talk as an addendum to this interview, go here.

The Dying Gauls are plaster casts of Hellenistic sculptures on which video interviews of young men from Lahore are superimposed. The men are asked about their view of heaven, hell, death and dying.

The casts used here are Dying Gauls. The Dying Gauls were commissioned in commemoration of the victory of the Greek over the Galatians, Celts from Asia Minor. They are part of a larger group of defeated enemies made up of Gauls, Amazons, giants and Persians. Unique in the representations of these Greek enemies is that they are depicted without a triumphing victor.They are seen as defeated but heroic warriors.

What of your other projects and/or research may have laid the
groundwork for Expressive Power Series Part 1?

The performance takes as its basis the script for Any Other Business, a 6-hour performance that I made last year, set in a conference center in Amsterdam. I wanted to bring out the central thesis of that work, to summarize it down to an hour in a way. So, for Expressive Power Series Part 1, I took four of its most contradictory and most outspoken characters and planted them in a seminar room of an art center. During the 6-hour Any Other Business piece, the characters never get to speak to each other, but are merely juxtaposed. In the new piece, I wanted them to confront each other directly. And when writing their new lines, they started to say things they didn’t say before.

Things that I learned or heard since last year; things that I am working on for new pieces; things that I was thinking about a long time ago and that suddenly seemed relevant again. They ended up summarizing my own thinking at the moment, in a way representing the voices in my ...

In the fall of 2008, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art invited several artists to create a
new work for the exhibition "Art of Participation: 1950 to Now." One such invitation was extended to
MTAA, a Brooklyn-based duo comprised of Mike Sarff and Tim Whidden, alternately known as M.River
& T.Whid Art Associates. In response, MTAA constructed a poll-based project entitled Automatic for the
People ( ), which asked the audience to vote upon the parameters for a theatrical performance executed at
the conclusion of the exhibition (the title’s empty parentheses refer to an undetermined subtitle).
Technically, the voting consisted of ten different electronic ballots addressing such creative and procedural
elements as duration, space, and props, with each being accessible for one week at a museum kiosk and
remotely online. All ten ballots contained ten options, and the most popular selections were incorporated
into the live finale. During the summer of 2009, I enlisted MTAA in an email-based interview regarding the
practical consequences and conceptual implications associated with producing their participatory poll and
performance for SFMOMA.

DAVID DUNCAN: Let’s begin with the project’s finale. Can you give an overview of the performance—
the staging, players and performers, costumes, and actions?

MIKE SARFF and TIM WHIDDEN: We began with the idea that the live work should come together as a
unified whole; we felt that a series of unconnected actions would feel untrue to the vote process. We also
wanted the audience to participate in the performance. To achieve this, we established three boundaries—
installation, duration and action. For the installation we had a location outside the museum’s freight
elevator that was selected by vote. The performance’s duration (the same length as the REM album
Automatic for the People) was also selected by vote. The action involved two teams competing to create the
best robot costume—again, an element determined by vote. Lastly, we included interruptions to the robot
costume building competition. These we called interludes and digressions—they were essentially acts
between acts that helped to pace the performance. The goal was to make it all seem solid even if an
audience member did not know anything about the whole of the AFTP: ( ) voting process.

DAVID DUNCAN: Beyond the audience’s participation, did MTAA conceive AFTP: ( ) in cooperation
with the SFMOMA staff?

MIKE SARFF: Yes, it was conceived for this space and institution. It would be good to note here that
although the vote kiosk installation and ...

David Toop is the author of several landmark books about music, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), and Haunted Weather (2004). He is also a musician, with a discography spanning nearly four decades. His first record - a collaboration with the sound sculptor Max Eastley titled New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments -- was released in 1975 on Brian Eno's Obscure label.

In Toop's previous books Ocean of Sound and Haunted Weather, he explored sound in all its ephemeral, enigmatic, amorphous connotations. His new book Sinister Resonance, out next month on Continuum, takes those explorations a step further, drawing a dense web of connections between sound and visual art. Toop begins the book with the concept that “sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location in space is ambiguous and whose existence in time is transitory.” To explore sound’s intangibility and mystery, Toop wanders through a bewildering array of references from fiction, myth, painting, and architecture, allowing him to approach sound in oblique and unexpected ways.

The art and design behind DIS Magazine is unlike any other fashion publication to date. Its contributors eschew the standard conventions of print publication to create an ever evolving series of related threads, organized around categories such as distaste, dystopia, discover, and dysmorphia. DIS is a collaborative project amongst artists, designers, stylists, writers and friends. They are Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, S. Adrian Massey III, Marco Roso, Patrik Sandberg, Nicholas Scholl, and David Toro, along with guest contributors that include artists such as Ryan Trecartin, Anna Lundh and Scott Hug. I recently conducted this Q&A via email with the members of DIS, in which they discuss the magazine's goals, its unique use of digital media technologies and the Web, and the future of the publication.

Andy Warhol hosted the television show "Fifteen Minutes" on MTV from 1986-1987, making only five episodes. Four of the five episodes are available below, the videos and text are sourced from The Jailbreak and the videos were originally discovered via Zamboni Soundtracks.